Friday, April 27, 2012

Anonymity and Award Votes..Dangerous In The Wrong Hands

I’m not sure
when exactly it happened.

Media,
communication, society, it all changes pretty fast these days. But at some
point, probably somewhere in-between My Space and Facebook, the concept of anonymity
started to become a problem. It was manageable
then, the occasional encoded e-mail address and what not. But with Twitter, it’s
now an epidemic.

And of course
the problem isn’t anonymity, it’s a wonderful thing if you’re fortunate enough
to have it. The problem, is that it comes with a certain amount of
entitlement. That lack-of-awareness,
fake-tough bravery that usually comes after too much to drink, or for those of
us new parents, not nearly enough sleep.

People say the
nastiest, vicious, twisted things when armed with a keyboard and the
invisibility cloak of the internet. They are, more often than not, the same
people that would smile, shake your hand or ask for an autograph if they saw
you in person. It’s a disturbing, ugly trend. I mean, sure it is. But it’s an absurdly small price
to pay for the freedom of speech we’re blessed to have and the extraordinary age
of technology in which we exist.

There are 100
million people on Twitter. If a few dozen backwards teenagers, bred in ignorance,
tweet something offensive after Joel Ward scores the overtime goal for the
Capitals, it’s not a story unless we make it one.

Morons have
existed from the beginning of time. So has classlessness, ignorance and hate.
And they always will. Progress isn’t eliminating them, that’s a noble idea but
it can’t be done. Progress is recognizing it, isolating it and going on with
life in the real world while the increasing minority of people fueled by race
and hate grows extinct.

It’s how we got
rid of disco, Members Only jackets and Lava Lamps. Just give it time.

Anyway, the
point is that as big a fan of anonymity as I am…I don’t think post-season award
ballots should be anonymous. Never have.
I’ve been voting for NBA MVP, and the other awards, for fourteen years now. It’s
a privilege, not a right. And I think with that privilege, comes a certain
amount of accountability. I’ve always made my ballot public and I think
everyone should. If you’re “expert”
enough to get a vote, you should be able to defend your choices, that’s all.

With that in mind, I’ll
be submitting my ballots to the league shortly, and here’s what they’ll look
like.

ALL-NBA

I always begin
here. By picking the top 15 guys in the league, it starts my process in picking
the five for my MVP ballot.

And the
strangest thing about the All-NBA team this year? In fact, the strangest thing maybe about this
truly strange NBA season? The center
spot. For years now, it’s actually been
a struggle to find three centers worthy of all-star consideration. You’d convince
yourself that Tim Duncan was playing center even if he wasn’t, or that Nene was
really underrated. It was a
struggle. This year, if you call Duncan
a center, there were legitimately seven guys competing for the third spot.

Dwight Howard
will get hurt in all the categories, Defensive Player, MVP, all-NBA because of
the (self-inflicted) drama of his season and the fact he missed the final two
weeks. But he’s still the gold standard at the position, and played the same number
of minutes this year that Dirk, Paul Pierce, Al Jefferson, did. Andrew Bynum
had a phenomenal year, to the point that I think he and Pau Gasol should really
put a dent in the Kobe-as-a-strong-MVP-candidate idea. Tyson Chandler is the
Defensive Player of the Year, no question. And although his 70% shooting were all
dunks and uncontested layups that come with playing alongside Carmelo and Amar’e,
he had a phenomenal year. Marc Gasol not only was 6th in the NBA in
minute played. Sixth! He was a double-double, starting center on a home court
playoff team. And if that sounds a lot like Roy Hibbert, it’s because he was as
well. Tim Duncan has willingly slid down the Spurs pecking order with Tony
Parker having an MVP year. But he’s had some old-school Timmy nights.

It was already
the best Center year in the fourteen years I’ve been in the NBA. The best since you had Ewing, Olaujowon,
Shaq, Mourning, David Robinson. (Can you appreciate what it must have been like
for Acie Earl to come into the league then? I only ask as an excuse to get an
Acie Earl mention in here).

But that was
before the unexpected addition of a first-ballot hall-of-famer, a 17-year
veteran and rookie center. In January, Kevin Garnett had to play center in a
TNT Thursday night game against Dwight Howard and the Magic. It looked like it
might be a horrific mismatch.

It was.

Garnett
destroyed him.

And that set the
tone for one of the remarkable stories of the 2012 season. Kevin Garnett, weeks
before his 36th birthday, shifting to center, continuing to dominate
defensively while giving the Boston offense four shooter to play with Rajon
Rondo. It was a game-changer in Boston’s season, maybe in the Eastern
Conference season and while a lot of people are talking about Rondo as an
MVP-candidate, he wasn’t even the MVP of his own team. That’s how good Garnett
was.

My centers were
Howard, Bynum and Garnett. Those three and Chandler were inter-changeable.

LeBron and Kevin
Durant were easy choices as the first team forwards. Kevin Love and Luol Deng
second. Easy. The last two spots, not so much. Blake Grififn had a strong
plus-minus year and obviously enough highlights for them to launch an ESPNBlake
channel in Bristol. Danny Granger and Andre Iguodala were my toughest omissions.
Granger the best all-around player on the surprise team in the NBA and Iguodala
was great early, but was as culpable for the Sixers collapse as anyone. Paul
Gasol very quietly had a strong second half. Carmelo missed a lot of time, but
showed MVP flashes late in the year under Mike Woodson. But before their season fell apart, LaMarcus
Aldridge was carrying the Blazers to a top-four spot in the West. He held that
team together longer than they should have been able to stay held together. And
while a lot of people in Boston are not fans of Josh Smith, and with good
reason, he’s played poorly against them it seems, for years. But the Hawks are
a home court playoff team. That wouldn’t
have shocked me at the start of the year, I really liked Atlanta, but that’s because
to me, Al Horford was a ready to have the kind of season that would get him on
this list. For him to miss the year, and the Hawks finish ahead of Boston,
Orlando and New York in the East? Didn’t seem possible. Josh Smith drives
people crazy, I get it, but he’s earned this spot. Led the league in defensive
win-shares, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Tony Parker,
Chris Paul and Kobe are in the MVP conversation, those are the first three
guards. After that, to me the other three aren’t hard, you have Rondo, Dwayne
Wade and Russell Westbrook, it’s just a matter of the order. Westbrook gets the
4th spot over Rondo in a tight one because he played every game on a
better team, Rondo missed 20% of the season and had some bad nights. His 20
best games, were as good as anyone in
the league, but he’ll be an MVP candidate when you get that two or three nights
out of three, not one. You can talk about Steve Nash, but that would be an
honorarium. Derrick Rose missed nearly half the year, he’s out. Mike Conley
deserves to have his name here, for the same reasons as Marc Gasol.

In any case,
here’s how it came out…

1st
team 2nd
team 3rd
team

F LeBron Love Aldridge

F Durant Deng J
Smith

C Howard Bynum Garnett

G Paul Kobe Rondo

G Parker Westbrook Wade

MOST VALUABLE PLAYER

Now you see why
I do all-NBA first. Now that we’re down to 15. Well, 16 because Chandler
deserves top 10 consideration. 1-2 is a no-brainer to me. People will say, write, blog and tweet
anything about LeBron James. A lot of it fair, most of it hilarious. But let’s just step away from that for a
second to say this. LeBron isn’t just the MVP in a runaway, easy choice. You
can put his 2012 season with any MVP of the last decade, maybe back to Jordan.
I’m sure some people will vote for Durant, I actually know someone who’s voting
LeBron third. But as Hubie Brown would
say, come on now…LeBron is the best player in the world…we know this…

The only
questions for me was one, who gets third Tony Parker or Chris Paul? And two, is
ther ea wild-card candidate that would knock Kobe out of 5th. The first wasn’t as complicated as I thought.
Chris Paul will probably get third but in the west, best player on the best
team? Parker. And after looking at Kevin Love, Dwight Howard and Luol Deng, I
begrudgingly went with Kobe 5th. Have some remorse on not going Deng
5th, but I’ll live with it, you can’t go wrong with Kobe onyour
ballot this time of year.

My Ballot: James, Durant, Parker, Paul, Bryant…with
Deng at 5 1/2.

ROOKIE OF THE
YEAR..

Really had a lot
of difficulty with this one. I mean, the winner was as easy as it gets. Kyrie
Irving is special. And he’ll do this award proud, meaning we’ll look back in 5
years and be glad he won, his name will fit in with all the others. Larry Bird, Tim Duncan, Shaq, Lebron, Emeka
Okafor.

OK, not all the others. But the other two spots were very difficult
for me. This year, we’ll call it the Ricky Rubio dilemma. Clearly, he was the second best rookie, and
right there with Kyrie in terms of impact on a team and really a franchise, but
playing into Doc Rivers’ notion that his favorite ability in an NBA player, is
avail-ability, he doesn’t make the top three. 41 out of 66 games just isn’t enough for
me. That’s missing nearly 40% of the
season. So that left me with two spots
to fill and no shortage of candidates.

Brandon Knight
is an attractive candidate, but finished last on his team in plus/minus. Kemba
Walekr by the way, has one of the worst +/- ratings in NBA history and finished
dead last in the league in field goal percentage, so no thanks. That Big East Tournament seems about ten
years ago now.

Kenneth Faried
and Greg Stiemsma were both bigs that made much larger impacts on playoff teams
that we could have thought. But neither
getting to 1,000 minutes hurts their cause.

MarShon Brooks
played lot. But not very well and on a
bad team. Klay Thompson and Isiah Thomas
I had ahead of Brooks, but not on my top tier.

So I was left
with Iman Shumpert, Kawhi Leonard and Chadler Parsons for the other two spots. Shumpert was very good defensively, but so
was Leonard on a much better team.

So what did I
do? I left then both off, completely backtracked
and reconsidered on Rubio, giving him the third spot and will likely be the
only one who voted Chandler Parsons 2nd. He was a starter on a winning team. Didn’t do
anything extraordinary but did almost everything well. Faried will likely get
the 3rd spot, but I went Irving,
Parsons, Rubio.

SIXTH MAN

Very similar to
Rookie. Obvious choice, followed by
several, hard-to-distinguish choices for 2 and 3. James Harden will win, and should win, and it
doesn’t take a Metta World Peace elbow to the side of your head to drive that
home.

It actually wasn’t
a great year for 6th men. Al
Harrington played a nice role for Denver. The Sixers had two strong candidates,
one offensively in Lou Williams, the other defensively in Thaddeus Young. Jason
Terry’s been a stalwart in this category, and people like new blood, but I don’t
think enough happened to displace him. Lamar Odom and Big Baby Davis, two strong
candidates last year, weren’t this year.

Have always hated
this category. So do coaches by the way. Here’s what I mean. Doc Rivers was
Coach of the Year as a rookie in 2000.
He hasn’t come close to winning it since. Does that mean he was a better
coach then? Funny thing about this year
as how it changed during the year, Stan Van Gundy and Kevin McHale were strong
candidates two-thirds of the way in, they won’t get near it. There are at least
six interchangeable candidates; Greg
Popovich, Tom Thibodeau, Frank Vogel, Rick Adelman, Lionel Hollins, Doc Rivers.
That’s the order I think they’ll finish. I went Vogel, Pop, Thibs, but it was basically flipping a coin.

MOST IMPROVED

Not a fan of
this category, too esoteric. Avery Bradley won’t get a sniff even though I’ve
never seen an overnight improvement like his this year. Ryan Anderson could win, and probably will. Some
think Jeremy Lin is a no-brainer. But as impactful as the Lin-Sanity stretch was? It was seven weeks long. That’s it, seven weeks. He played less than
half the year. That said, he deserves some resonance in a season that everyone
will remember him for. The unspoken rule is this is for a guy that went from
the periphery to legitmate NBA standout. If it was from standout to star, you’d
be talking guys like Bynum, Conley and Josh Smith. But as it is, I went Anderson, Lin, Nikola Pekovic.

And there you
have it, a difficult year to navigate if you cover the league, a difficult year
to get the awards right, but we did our best to handle both.

About Me

Having just completed his 14th season in the NBA and 11th as the voice of the Boston Celtics, Sean Grande’s epic account of the two-month run to the 2008 Championship, and the classic Game 7 of the 2010 NBA Finals cemented his status as one of the nation’s elite play-callers. Sean, who now trails only the legendary Johnny Most as the longest-tenured radio voice of the Celtics, will be joined again by Cedric Maxwell for all Boston Celtics games. For over a decade, “Grande and Max” have been one of Boston’s most popular on-air combinations. On February 3rd, 2012 they called their 1,000th game together.
On December 3rd, 2009 in San Antonio, Sean called his 1000th NBA Game, joining NBA icon Marv Albert and Ian Eagle as the only three to reach that plateau before the age of 40.
Sean returned to Boston in 2001 after three years as both the television voice of the Minnesota Timberwolves, and the youngest announcer in the NBA. Grande’s play-by-play credits include two seasons of ABC Sports College Football. He returned to the national scene last September, calling the FIBA Americas tournament on ESPN.
Check out Sean’s full bio at Celtics.com